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Anonymous Connections
The Body and Narratives of the Social in Victorian Britain
By Tina Young Choi The University of Michigan Press
Copyright © 2015 Tina Young Choi
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-12153-3
CHAPTER 1
At Risk
Statistical Participation and the Victorian City
In his 1880 essay, "Fiction, Fair and Foul," John Ruskin laments that Dickens's novels provide "the thoroughly trained Londoner ... no other excitement than that to which he has been accustomed. ... In the single novel of Bleak House there are nine deaths. ... And all this, observe, not in a tragic, adventurous, or military story, but merely ... as a properly representative average of the statistics of civilian mortality in the centre of London" (440–41). Pairing this complaint with a mock statistical table that enumerates these fictional deaths and their causes ("One by assassination," "One by sorrow" [440]) Ruskin satirizes the statistical perspective of the age. But his words also contain a serious insight, both about the experience of reading Victorian novels and about what it means to be a "thoroughly trained Londoner." According to Ruskin, Dickens's fiction expresses — in spite of its author's well-known condemnation of statistics in works like Hard Times — a certain statistical logic, such that readers come to expect a certain allotment of outcomes, such as deaths, over the course of a novel and within its finite population. But Ruskin also extends his claim to London as a lived space of statistical expectation about bodily risk, where any number of events might be seen as probable, and perhaps even inevitable, within its population.
His complaint about Bleak House might have applied to any number of mid-Victorian novels, in which deaths, accidents, and illness seem an almost compulsory component of representations of the city. This chapter investigates how the novel — and the social spaces it described — came to be seen as such risky places. How did becoming "accustomed" to thinking about personally catastrophic events as statistically inevitable invite readers to reimagine the nature of social participation?
An 1860 All the Year Round essay exemplifies a version of the statistical sensibility that would trouble Ruskin two decades later, its unnamed author declaring that "it concerns a man more to know his risks of the fifty illnesses that may throw him on his back, than the possible date of the one death that must come" ("Registration," 228). The essayist not only recognizes the value of statistical knowledge ("to know one's risks") and even makes the case for the tabulation of more statistics, but remarkably, he also makes that claim in Dickens's own journal. Dickens himself had famously caricatured and critiqued statistical studies in The Pickwick Papers and in Hard Times; the Mudfog Association's self-important and pointlessly detailed statistical reports, whose object was the "Advancement of Everything," and the unforgiving "facts" meted out like bitter doses by the utilitarian Gradgrind and the schoolmaster M'Choakumchild pointed to the emptiness of statistical inquiry in comparison with what Dickens's novels typically celebrated: individuals, families, and domestic feeling.
But I argue in this chapter that even as his and others' novels disavowed such calculations, especially when applied to humans, they also inhabited and explored the risky statistical spaces between inevitability (the "death that must come") and uncertainty (one's "risks") in their representations of the social. In these less determined forms, as probabilities rather than as facts, statistics came to occupy not only the pages of his novels but also the everyday vocabulary and imagination of average Victorians. Social belonging, statistics implied, was inherently risky, a space in which inclusion entailed a range of possible, unwilled events; what is more, those possibilities could only be understood with relation to a large number of other persons and bodies. In this sense, the condition of the individual conscripted into a statistical population resembled the more general problematic of the Victorian subject, a product of what Goodlad has described as liberalism's "pervasive tensions and paradoxes," where individual freedoms existed in an often uneasy equilibrium with the exigencies of citizenship and public identity, with the spaces of others' rights and desires (viii). Analogously, in situating the self within a realm of inevitable bodily participation, of births, deaths, accidents, and illnesses occurring with regular frequency, social statistics revealed his or her condition of physiological belonging. Statistical "risk," with its percentages and abstract populations, supplied a numerical account of what the self shared with others.
An earlier definition of risk, outlined by Daston and Elaine Freedgood, referred to the voluntary activities of gamblers and adventurers, who weighed reward and hazard in their speculative undertakings (Classical Probability, 140–72; Freedgood, 7–9). The "risk" in uncertain investment or even travel depended, at least to some extent, upon the individual's own agency, a decision to "take a risk." But with the rise of the statistical sciences at the start of the nineteenth century, another conception of "risk" emerged, describing not a condition entered voluntarily but rather one in which the urban environment enforced one's participation, in which the individual found himself or herself involuntarily immersed. This understanding of risk, which anticipates what sociologist Ulrich Beck has termed our late-modern "risk society," an inhabiting of the "unknown and unintended" forces that shape our fates (22), was — as both Ruskin and Dickens perceived — an element of the Victorian experience as well. According to the period's writings, urban living in particular implied that one was subject to the threat of disease and violence, a threat that statistics represented as shared by a population. Indeed, statistics reduced the self to a body, an entity defined by the probability for accident, illness, or death, while its percentages also posited an arithmetic continuity between the individual and other bodies occupying the same space. What is more, the transformation of "risk" extended beyond contemplations about one's own mortality such that, several decades later, Ruskin and others implicitly recognized that readers were importing that statistical sensibility into the realm of the novel as well. In transforming both the novel reader's and city dweller's expectations of what might take place within these spaces, the discourse of risk shaped a new vision of sociality.
William Farr and the Quantification of Uncertainty
Knowing one's risks, the All the Year Round essay reminded readers, demanded quantitative measures, and yet even numbers could not provide certainty, only a more specific form of uncertainty: the maladies that "may" affect one, the "possible date" of death. The condition of being at risk, between the poles of certainty and impossibility, was reflected in two quite visible facts of urban life: that on the one hand, the sources of disease were to be found everywhere — in the streets, cemeteries, cesspools, and public wells — and on the other, that not everyone succumbed to disease. How could one explain this apparent paradox, whereby some were afflicted while others remained healthy? An 1826 article attempting to come to some conclusion on precisely this point was, according to one account, what inspired a young William Farr to pursue a career first in medicine and later in the General Register Office, where he would help to transform that paradox into the language of probability. For while earlier sanitary and social reformers like James Phillips Kay had used numbers and tables as corroborating but incidental material in reports, the work of Farr and others in the late 1830s made statistical science integral to the project of public health and social reform, where tables of percentages and correlations would serve as primary forms of evidence.
Until the 1830s, statistics remained undefined in terms of its methodology, and was understood as a specialized form of the social sciences, dedicated more generally to what the inaugural issue of the Journal of the Statistical Society of London called "the collection and comparison of Facts which illustrate the condition of mankind" ("Introduction," 1). These "facts," as early contributions to the Journal reveal, were frequently of a narrative, nonnumerical nature. Tables of rates and figures were more commonly found in actuarial texts, where they were used to estimate life expectancy for the purposes of calculating rates of insurance and annuity. But in the late 1830s and early 1840s, these two branches of science, the social statistical and the actuarial, converged in the published works of statistician Farr and social reformer Edwin Chadwick.
Chadwick had assumed responsibility for the Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain in the late 1830s in his role as secretary to the Poor Law Commission; at that time the Report was intended for a parliamentary readership, as a modest project to investigate the problem of public "nuisances," or waste, whose removal was perceived as an added burden to poor relief. Yet a number of factors — Chadwick's Benthamite training, his conviction that sanitary reform should be managed at a central rather than local level, and a personal ambition for which he was notorious — meant that the Report quickly exceeded the Commission's directives and even eclipsed the Poor Law Commission's own centrality to the project of Victorian social reform. Indeed, the resulting Report, published in 1842, was a sensational success, with an initial distribution reported to be between ten thousand and twenty thousand copies, and possibly more.
The Bills of Mortality had itemized deaths in London since the seventeenth century, but Chadwick's statistical methods went much further in drawing attention to the relationships among disease, mortality, and population. The revised tables of mortality that appeared at the very beginning of Chadwick's lengthy report had been produced by Farr at the General Register Office, and signified, as M. W. Flinn puts it, "a major turning-point" (27). The 1839 table provided a systematic, detailed analysis of mortality by location and by cause, and the remainder of Chadwick's report insistently integrated similar statistical tables throughout, showing life expectancy and rates of sickness and death for different age and occupational groups. By linking such data about disease, mortality, and life expectancy across Britain to firsthand testimony about living conditions from local inspectors and officials, the Report was both impressive and groundbreaking in its scope. While it subdivided Britain's population by geography, occupation, age, and sex, it came to a number of encompassing conclusions, both statistical and narrative, about the continuities in rates of disease and premature death across disparate groups. For readers, this was a vision of unprecedented comprehensiveness — one that also anticipated the extent of Chadwick's eventual plans for sanitary reform, an encompassing (and controversially centralizing) set of legislative, administrative, and infrastructural changes for the nation. That vision, as Poovey and Gilbert have shown, allowed for the making of a Victorian "social body," an efficiently aggregated entity upon which medical and public health discourse might operate. At the same time, it invited individual readers to reimagine their relationship to that social whole. For Chadwick's point, in documenting the rates of disease from one region to another or the dangerously unsanitary conditions from street to street in London, was not to reassure readers that they lived in comparative safety. Rather, it enjoined them to engage in a curious act of identification, one that the statistic performed for them — indeed, performed on them — to imagine that those percentages might also apply to themselves. Population statistics, in other words, promoted an account of the social that was not only comprehensive but also decidedly inclusive, defying the usual distinctions of local geography, social class, and gender.
In addition, Farr's statistics challenged the accuracy of the primary table in use at the time, the Northampton Table of Mortality, constructed by Richard Price in the eighteenth century and still heavily influential at the end of the 1830s. Numerous life assurance firms, such as the Alfred, the British Commercial, the Imperial, the Palladium, the Rock, the Royal Exchange, the Westminster, and the Scottish Equitable employed the Northampton Table as their primary reference for calculating life annuities and insurance rates, even as it had been publicly criticized in the decades before Farr's investigation for seeming to overestimate rates of mortality, thereby resulting in considerable governmental and corporate financial losses through high annuity payouts.
After painstaking attempts to reconstruct Price's Table from historical birth and death records as well as from Price's own imperfect records of his methods, Farr concluded that the Table was "erroneous to an extent that deprives it of all value" ("Letter" 277). Price assumed, among other things, that the population remained constant in Northampton between 1735 and 1780, and that the number of births recorded by Anglican parish registers accurately reflected the actual number of births — an assumption that was especially problematic, noted Farr, given Northampton's large Dissenting population ("Letter," 277); by undercounting the living population, Farr revealed, Price's table displayed disproportionately high rates of mortality at every age. Yet assurance companies relied upon these eighteenth-century statistics as applicable to any nineteenth-century city in England or Scotland.
In his revision, Farr reproduces a version of the Northampton table, showing the population still living at any given age. Farr places Price's calculations and their nineteenth-century adjustments in the first two columns after "Age," and labels them "False Tables"; these he compares with two sets of his own calculations, labeled the "True Northampton Life Table" in column 3 (fig. 1). The "false" and "true" tables display noticeably different mortality rates, with the "false" tables indicating higher rates. But the more striking difference lies in their starting populations. Where Price's original table begins with 11,650 persons, and its nineteenth-century equivalent with 11,855 persons, Farr calculates based upon a hypothetical starting population of 10,000 persons. For the early nineteenth-century reader (as for many a modern-day counterpart), the indivisibility of Price's starting population's by 100 makes interpretation of the "false" tables a daunting task. For example, what percentage of the original population is still alive at age twenty? And does the rate of mortality increase or decrease once a person reaches his or her thirties? The Northampton Table offers figures that discourage such statistical thinking. Moreover, in describing his statistics as "the genuine Table of Observations for Northampton" ("Letter," 283), Price implies that the 11,650 represented actual individuals from Northampton, rather than hypothetical ones. By contrast, Farr's table implicitly encourages the reader's engagement in hypothetical thinking. By normalizing its starting population to 10,000, his table not only makes the reader's calculation of probabilities a relatively trivial task, but significantly, also tacitly announces that no such population ever existed, except in the imagination by agreement between the statistician and the reader. Indeed, Farr follows the table with what can only be described as an exercise in statistical thinking, with a series of questions directed to the reader about explicitly fictionalized individuals: "What annual premium should James Just, aged 30, pay to insure £10000 at his death?" "What sum paid down by John Jones, aged 20, will provide him a deferred annuity of £10 the first payment to be made, if he be alive, at the age of 61?" ("Letter," 289).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Anonymous Connections by Tina Young Choi. Copyright © 2015 Tina Young Choi. Excerpted by permission of The University of Michigan Press.
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